AGADE Archive February 1-7, 2015
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AGADE Archive February 1-7, 2015 Contents February 1 eREVIEWS: Of ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit eREVIEWS: Of "Henchmen of Ares: Warriors and Warfare in Early Greece" LECTURES: "The Al-Yahudu Archive in the Jewish World Today" (Jerusalem, EXHIBITIONS: Mapping the Holy Land III (Jerusalem. February 17--June 27) BOOKS: Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World WORKSHOPS: Masculinities in ANE (Rome, 05/02/2015) APPEALS: Save the Beşparmak Dağları (Mt Latmos) eREVIEWS: Of "Ecrire à ses morts: enquête sur un usage rituel de l'écrit dans NEWS: 2,200-Year-Old Moat Discovered in Spain EXHIBITIONS: Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World OBITUARIES: For Marcus Borg February 2- no emails sent February 3 CONFERENCES: "Neolithic Networks in the longue durée" (Berlin, Dec. 9-11) CALLS FOR PAPERS: Landscapes of Settlement in the Ancient Near East (ASOR 2015) CONFERENCES: Aspects of Family Law in the ancient World (London, April 22-24) JOURNALS: International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 44/1 (March 2015) JOURNALS: Henoch 36/2 (2014) APPEALS: Save Libyan Archaeology NOTICES: HUCA online NEWS: Damage to the Al-Arish National Museum WORKSHOPS: "...Environmental Impact of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in Northwestern Israel" (Jerusalem, Feb. 12) BOOKS: By the Rivers of Babylon, The Story of the Babylonian Exile LECTURES: "Traces of Race" (Toronto, February 11 February) KUDOS: For Paul Flesher POSTDOCS: Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik (Innsbruck) JOURNALS: Historiae 11 (2014) CALLS FOR PAPERS: "Representing the Senses in the Ancient Near East..." (RAI Geneva/Bern 2015) CONFERENCES: "Ancient” Art and the Art Historical Canon Today" (NYC, Feb 13) February 4 eREVIEWS: Of "Herodots Quellen - Die Quellen Herodots." AWARDS: For publication assistance (Institute for Aegean Prehistory) LECTURES: ‘The Scandal of a Male Bible’ (London, Feb 24) eREVIEWS: Of "Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal" February 5 LECTURES: “The Literature of the Copts..." (Washington, March 26) CONFERENCES: "... Visual Narratives in the Cultures and Societies of the Old World" (Freiburg, March 18-21) SAD NEWS: Erika Endesfelder ( 1935-2015) February 6 CONFERENCES: "... Humans and Anthropomorphs in the Rock Art of Northern Africa" (Brussels, 17-19 September) BOOKS: Reprint of SAA & SAAS volumes LECTURES: "Ecologies of divination" (NYC, Feb 13) BOOKS: “Apotropaic Intercession” in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East eJOURNALS: Miscellanea 15.3 & 15.4 BLOGS: Speaking women in the Bible POSTDOCS: “Immaterial Causes and Physical Space” (Slavonic philology) CALLS FOR PAPERS: "Approaches to the Study of Dress and the Body" (ASOR 2015) ------------------------------------------------------------------ February 1 eREVIEWS: Of ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit From <http://www.timesofisrael.com/by-the-rivers-of-babylon-exhibit-breathes-life-into-judean-exile/>: [Go there for pix] ============================== ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ exhibit breathes life into Judean exile Never-before-showcased clay tablets documenting the first diaspora go on display at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum BY ILAN BEN ZION We know they sat on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, and that they wept. But a new exhibit at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum puts faces and names to the Judean exiles in ancient Babylonia 2,500 years ago. “By the Rivers of Babylon” showcases a collection of about 100 rare clay tablets from 6th century Mesopotamia that detail the lives of exiled Judeans living in the heartland of the Babylonian Empire. Through these mundane Akkadian legal documents written in cuneiform, scholars have breathed life back into generations of Judeans who lived in Babylon but whose names and traditions speak of a longing for Zion. The Al-Yahudu tablets are part of a private collection that has never before gone on public display. Their provenance is unknown; they likely turned up somewhere in southern Iraq, but no one knows when. After decades on the antiquities market they ended up in the hands of a private collector, David Sofer, who offered to loan them to the Bible Lands Museum. After two years of labor, the exhibit is opening to the public on Sunday. “It puts a face on the real people who went through these fateful events,” Dr. Filip Vukosavovic, curator of the exhibit, told The Times of Israel. The tablets preserve a wealth of Judean names — including the familiar Natanyahu — of the exilic community, and even include a handful of Aramaic inscriptions. The exhibit takes visitors through the final days of Jerusalem before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, and transports them to Mesopotamia, where the deportees were resettled. At the center of the gallery is a model of a Mesopotamian village, animated to show light shimmering on the canals at night and farmers plowing the field at midday, similar to those in which Judeans made their home. Before the Al-Yahudu texts were found and studied, scholars only had an outline of life for Judeans in Babylon, said Dr. Wayne Horowitz, Hebrew University’s professor of Assyriology, who helped prepare the exhibition and the corresponding academic literature. “We had before this an outline, a tradition, but as historians we couldn’t prove it. And now we’re actually seeing the community living its life, really fleshed out.” He compared the experience of the exiled Judeans to that of new immigrants to Israel in the early years of the state. They were settled in a region of southern Babylon that had been ravaged by years of war and forced to rebuilt infrastructure and dig canals — the rivers by which they wept when they remembered Zion. “Once they had built the infrastructure they were allowed to settle and build their lives,” Horowitz explained. Within a short while, the community became more prosperous and secure, a fact documented in the financial documents preserved in clay. “It’s impossible to exaggerate when it comes to the importance and the amount” of information gleaned from the tablets, Vukosavovic said. He called the Babylonian exile the “most important event in the history of the Jewish people.” Each document catalogs when and where it was written and by whom, providing scholars with an unprecedented view into the day-to-day life of Judean exiles in Babylonia, as well as a geography of where the refugees were resettled. The earliest in the collection, from 572 BCE, mentions the town of Al-Yahudu — “Jerusalem” — a village of transplants from Judea. “Finally through these tablets we get to meet these people, we get to know their names, where they lived and when they lived, what they did,” Vukosavovic said. The texts help dispel the misconception that the Judeans in Babylon were second-class citizens of the empire, living in ghettos and pressed into hard labor. While some toiled in base drudgery, others thrived, owned property, plantations and slaves, and became part of the Babylonian bureaucratic hierarchy. “It teaches us that we weren’t slaves, like we were slaves to the Pharaoh,” Vukosavovic said. “It teaches us that we were simply free people in Babylon, living not only in Al-Yahudu, but also in a dozen other cities where Jews either lived or did their business.” Employing a variety of media — animated videos, antiquities from the destruction of Jerusalem, illuminated manuscripts, and illustrations to complement conventional text — the gallery culminates with the clay tablets accompanied by iPad tablets replete with information to better understand the cuneiform texts. “One of the challenges of creating this show was to make it accessible [to the general public],” museum director Amanda Weiss said. “We had to create a way that would entice all ages to relate to this information.” “This is an amazing collection. It is truly the world premiere of this archive on display,” said Weiss. “It’s never been published, it’s never been displayed until now.” She said the museum admits thousands of schoolchildren each year, and she hopes that the exhibition will “supplement or inspire learning” of biblical history, “to take it away from the boring or the difficult.” The exhibit opens Sunday, February 1, at the Bible Lands Museum, and will run for a year. eREVIEWS: Of "Henchmen of Ares: Warriors and Warfare in Early Greece" Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.01.51 Josho Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares: Warriors and Warfare in Early Greece . Ancient Warfare special, 4. Rotterdam: Karwansaray Publishers, 2013. Pp. v, 203. ISBN 9789490258078. €29.95. Reviewed by Christopher Matthew, Australian Catholic University ([email protected]) Josho Brouwers’s Henchmen of Ares is a recent addition to the growing body of non-scholarly literature examining warfare in the ancient Greek world from earliest times the end of the Classical Period. This work is beautifully presented with magnificent colour illustrations reconstructing the warriors of ancient Greece and images of artefacts and artworks throughout. Text boxes and sidebars scattered across the chapters take the reader to additional information about specific elements of ancient Greek warfare without taking anything away from the flow of the main narrative of the text. The book is well written and easy to read and appears to have been designed with the layman and/or general reader with an interest in this period of history as its target audience. Consequently, this book is not academic in its feel—despite being a reworked version of Brouwers’s doctoral dissertation. There are, for example, no references (footnotes or endnotes) within the book, other than in-text citations of key ancient texts when they are quoted within the chapters. Nor is there a list of suggested ‘further reading’ or a standard bibliography. Rather, the ‘bibliographical notes’ at the end of the book (pages 150-170) contain pages of discussion of some modern texts which deal with various aspects of the chapters to which they are associated. However, even these notes are in places simplistic in their form and are missing references to some key works relevant to the examined topics.